Election Assembly

11/4/2016

Last Friday was a historic day at Buckley Country Day School, as we hosted the fourth presidential debate of this year’s election cycle.

First, our second graders shared with us what they had learned about our democracy, why we vote, and how the president is elected. Most importantly, they reminded us, in music, that “It’s your civic duty; vote for somebody.”

Sixth grade students, anchormen Bryan Byrne and Sandeep Sood, created a news clip introducing the Republican and Democratic candidates and recounting their path to the nomination.

Finally, four eighth graders (Charlotte Baker, Ellenese Espaillat, Eleni Vasiliades, and Simon Wigdor) debated Secretary Clinton’s and Mr. Trump’s platforms regarding the economy, foreign policy, terrorism, immigration and the education. Our extremely able moderators (Alex Goldenberg and Kate Wehle) then asked questions that had been emailed by our community ahead of time, but that the candidates had not seen before.

Following the debate, students in grades 1-8 voted. Each grade was assigned a number of electoral votes proportional to enrollment. Each grade was a “winner-take-all” grade. There were 95 electoral votes up for grabs.

Popular vote: Secretary Clinton won 56% of the votes and Mr. Trump won 37% of the votes. 7% were blank ballots or write-ins.

Thank you to all the student participants in our debate, as well as Ms. Raffaele, Mrs. Rosenthal, and Dr. Glennon.

We are particularly proud of the in-depth research our debaters did to present the platforms of their respective candidates in a way meant to explain the different ideas at stake in the upcoming election and for doing so while modeling a political discourse that should be the gold standard for future campaigns.